Phone hacking: thousands of emails deleted from News International - Telegraph.co.uk

HCL said it "does not hold any information belonging to News International (nor has it ever held such information) relevant to the subject matter of the current investigation".

Instead, it said, HCL's role was to manage the IT systems at News International "including servers, applications, databases, email systems networks etc".

In the letter, HCL disclosed that News International asked three times for emails to be deleted in April last year. One request was for the deletion of email inboxes of people who had left the company, although this was not carried out.

There was a second request to delete "200,000+ plus delivery failure messages", although these were erased before HCL could "initiate any action". In the same month emails of an employee who was still at the company were deleted.

In May, 21,000 messages "which were apparently stuck in the outbox" were deleted, while in July another "public folder" of emails was erased.

Last September more emails were erased as part of a process that involved "pruning the historic email archives".

There was a further request in January this year to delete more data from the database. HCL said it could not assist and suggested an unnamed third party firm helped. The two final requests to delete emails were in February and July, when the company was "migrating" information between two software systems.

Last night, a News International spokesman said: "Since January, News International (NI) has been actively working with the police on Operation Weeting with regards to email data and other computer information which may be relevant to their inquiry.

"NI keeps backups of its core systems and, in close co-operation with the Operation Weeting team, has been working to restore these backups."